DAVID DE VRIES and SHANI BAR-ON Politicization of Unemployment in British-Ruled Palestine

DAVID DE VRIES AND SHANI BAR-ON Politicization of Unemployment in British-Ruled Palestine in MATTHIAS REISS AND MATT PERRY (eds.), Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 199–219 ISBN: 978 0 199 59573 0 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 8 Politicization of Unemployment in British-Ruled Palestine DAVID DE VRIES AND SHANI BAR-ON Unemployment in Mandate Palestine (rgr7-47) has long attracted the attention of historians. One reason was the sheer size of unemployment, its share in the labour force, and its relation to immigration. The second reason was the politicization of the issue. Whilst the Arabs persistently claimed that expanding Jewish immigration aggravated unemployment, the Jews retorted no less vociferously thatJewish immigration brought along capital and skills which, in turn, enhanced economic opportunities, thereby eventually reducing unemployment. Against the background of a social phenomenon hitherto unknown in Mandate Palestine in such dimensions, and of political leaders in the two communities mobilizing the unemployed for political purposes in the Arab- Jewish conflict, emerged a third characteristic of contemporary unemployment: the yawning gap between the potential it created for social unrest and the paucity of organized protest by the unemployed themselves. Contemporaries were keenly aware of the wrath of the unemployed. It evoked substantial fears among the British authorities, in particular during the Arab rebellion; and many among the leaders of the Jewish polity in pre-rg48 Palestine suspected that it undermined the hegemony of Zionist institutions in the towns. At the same time, however, hardly any serious institutional measures were required in response to the scattered protests of the unemployed-they simply died out on their own, and to many they unsurprisingly seemed to lack energy and per- sistence. This interplay between the enormity of unemployment and the feeble expression of protest is a telling prism through which the protests of the unemployed in Mandate Palestine and the contexts in which they emerged can be understood. First we focus on the Yishuv, and in particular on the economic crisis which dramatically affected the Jewish sector of the Palestine 200 DAVID DE VRIES AND SHANI BAR-ON economy in 1926-8. It was here that post-First World War Palestine first witnessed the full intensity of the social force inher- ent in unemployment, its impact on Zionist institutions and on the Zionist labour movement itself. Our second focus is on the potential in the anger of the unemployed to influence ideology, organization, and politics. Here we turn to the Arab community of Mandate Palestine and, in particular, to the Arab revolt of 1936-9 and the politicization of unemployment. Finally, we con- sider the British Mandatory 'state' as a major employer in Palestine and in particular the united Jewish-Arab protests of May 1947 against the threat of unemployment faced by demobi- lized servicemen and those employed by the Mandate authorities during the Second World War. Unemployment and the Jewish Community Organized protest of unemployed immigrants and workers was introduced to Palestine in the 1920s, largely by Jews. Sporadic dis- content about lack of jobs emerged among Arabs during the First World War and amongJewish immigrants during the economic slowdown of the early 1920s, but it did not amount to much. If any- thing, the response to mounting unemployment was mainly institutional. The British Palestine government sought to reduce the cost of its rule and shirked responsibility for the unemployed, and it cur- tailedJewish immigration because of the conviction in government circles that the Palestinian economy was incapable of absorbing new entrants. 1 Response in the Jewish community came mainly from the labour movement. Using the Histadrut (established in December 1920), its trade union organization, and local labour councils, labour developed a more active approach seeking to con- vince Jewish employers to prefer Jewish immigrants and workers over 'cheap' Arab labour. Many Histadrut members joined this national-oriented campaign, often by participating in strikes and, occasionally, in violence. Although these battles employed the Zionist terminology ofJewish state-building, they hardly had an impact on private employers and without concerted Zionist pressure to bring about a change in Britain's non-interventionist 1 John Gal, Burden by Choice? Policy Towards the Unemployed in Pre-State Palestine and Israel I92o--1995 (Beer Sheba, 2002, in Hebrew), 40. Politicization of Unemployment in Mandate Palestine 201 approach there was not much labour could do. 2 The Histadrut was left, therefore, to develop a series of social and cultural institutions which, through its town-based labour councils, catered for the needs of the unemployed and served as a surrogate address for their economic plight and anger. During the economic boom of the mid- 1920s, which was set off by Jewish immigration and import of capital, and significantly eased the pressure of unemployment, these labour institutions became labour's main lever in organizing new immigrants, finding jobs for them, and providing economic and social institutions and a sense of community. Clearly, the mix of Zionism, institutional care, and control of urban labour that these communal arrangements entailed was hardly a hothouse for working-class radicalism. 3 It was only in the wake of the 'great economic crisis' which beset the Jewish building and manufacturing sectors in 1926-8 that job scarcity became a specific cause for social unrest. However, the main reason why protest was, by and large, an internal Jewish affair was that it followed the large wave ofJewish immigration (of Russian and Polish Jews)in 1924-5 and focused on the inability of the Jewish private and public sectors to absorb the immigrants. Among the Arab majority of the population in Palestine, unemployment was harsh, in particular, in the agricultural sector, as the British government well noted. But during the 1920s as a whole and the downturn of 1926-8 itself, unemployed Arabs hardly turned to organized protest at all. In the eyes of contemporaries, the crisis was indeed unprece- dented. In 1926 the construction industry stagnated totally, and the number of those without work was five times that of the previous year. In 1927 the crisis climaxed, hitting in particular Jewish immigrants, Jewish workers in the towns, and the unskilled. Of the Jewish population of 149,800 in 1927 with a workforce of 55,900, the unemployed reached a decadal high of 7,300.4 Though the 2 On the emergence of the concept see Aviva Halamish, 'Immigration According to Economic Absorptive Capacity: The Guiding Principles, Modes of Operation and the Demographic Implications of the Interwar Immigration Policy', in Avi Bareli and Nachum Karlinsky (eds.), Economy and Society during the Mandate (Beersheba, 2003, in Hebrew), 179-216. 3 Dan Giladi, 'The Yishuv during the Fourth Wave oflmmigration, 1924-1929' (Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University,Jerusalem, 1968), 33-5; David De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy in 1920s Palestine: The Origins of 'RedHaifa (Tel Aviv, 1999, in Hebrew), chs. 3-4. 4 Jacob Metzer and Oded Kaplan, The Jewish and Arab Economies in Mandatory Palestine: Production, Employment and Growth (Jerusalem, 1990, in Hebrew), 104. See also Nadav Halevi, 202 DAVID DE VRIES AND SHANI BAR-ON impact of the crisis was not uniform, hitting low-waged workers more than salaried workers and the urban areas with a strong Histadrut presence, the sense of catastrophe was widespread. 5 The major repercussion of the crisis was that it exposed the inability of the Histadrut and the Zionist movement in general to ease the levels of unemployment and to close the gap between the influx ofunskilledjewish immigrants and low capital investment.6 Pressure exerted by labour on both the Palestine government and the Zionist leadership to create jobs resulted eventually in only a marginal increase in employment. Inability to influence the avail- ability ofjobs induced the Histadrut to acquiesce in the granting of material support to the unemployed, using small sums of money fromjewish capital funds transferred by the World Zionist Organization. 7 The second repercussion of the crisis was the increasing ambivalence in Jewish society concerning the viability of the Zionist project in Palestine.8 Chronic lack of employment entailed severe hardship and affected the ability to provide even the most basic essentials. In many places real hunger took hold, and workers faced difficulties paying for accommodation, clothing, and medical treatment. Hence the letter written by 'workers who have been hungry for two days' to the Histadrut-affiliated Petah Tikva labour council: 'The situation has reached the point where there isn't even a morsel of bread to last the day.'9 Physical debility as a result of the shortages made it difficult for workers to return to manual labour, even when this could be found. Conditions regu- lating aid were such that it barely provided minimal subsistence, and until the financial support programme of Zionist institutions in the summer of 1926, hunger and destitution were the lot of 'The Political Economy of Absorptive Capacity: Growth and Cycles in Jewish Palestine under the British Mandate', Middle Eastern Studies, 19 (1983}, 458-9 5 Giladi, 'The Yishuv', 186; De Vries, Idealism and Bureaucracy, 211.

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